Ah, the power of the aggrieved Other and the manipulative progressive media to play the racist card — which only seems to work against craven, pandering Republican politicians interested in “rebranding” (and maybe George Zimmerman, the “white Hispanic”) these days.
CNS:
President Obama has been touting his record setting ICE figures since at least 2010. His administration has deported a record 1.5 million people in his first term alone, which has drawn the ire of the Hispanic community. Yet, a new study from the Center for Immigration Studies paints a different picture: ICE officers ignoring state criminal convictions and dropping cases if illegal alien advocates hold vigils.
In short, it’s a catch and release tale. Jessica M. Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at CIS, wrote in her report released over the weekend that:
In 2013, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] reported 722,000 encounters with potentially deportable aliens, most of whom came to their attention after incarceration for a local arrest. Yet ICE officials followed through with immigration charges for only 195,000 of these aliens, only about one-fourth. According to ICE personnel, the vast majority of these releases occurred because of current policies that shield most illegal aliens from enforcement, not because the aliens turned out to have legal status or were qualified to stay in the United States.
Many of the aliens ignored by ICE were convicted criminals. In 2013, ICE agents released 68,000 aliens with criminal convictions, or 35 percent of all criminal aliens they reported encountering.
Concerning the Obama White House taking pride in being the Deporter-in-Chief on immigration, Vaughan added that:
ICE was able to achieve these “record” departures only because the agency was taking credit for removing a large number of individuals who were apprehended by the Border Patrol. Such cases made up the majority of ICE’s reported deportations in 2013, but they had never been counted that way in previous administrations. Although former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano denied that the ICE reports on her watch were misleading, her successor, Jeh Johnson, recently admitted to a House committee that the administration’s deportation figures are not comparable to previous administrations because of the large number of border removal cases.
Now, ICE also released 68,000 illegal aliens with criminal records, which is inexcusable; but how many detained had criminal backgrounds?
In 2013, ICE agents reported encountering 193,000 criminal aliens – yet they targeted only 125,000 of these criminal aliens for deportation, letting off 68,000, or 35 percent of the total. The ICE field offices with the largest ratios of criminal releases were San Antonio, New York City, DC/Virginia, and Newark (N.J.).
These figures suggest that despite claims of a focus on public safety, the administration’s prosecutorial discretion criteria are allowing factors such as family relationships, political considerations, or attention from advocacy groups to trump criminal convictions as a factor leading to deportation.
[…]
In addition, ICE agents and officers have been instructed to ignore convictions for state crimes if the conviction occurred under a state law that the administration opposes or thinks is too harsh. Finally, many criminal aliens have been released from ICE custody, received case continuances, and sometimes even case dismissals as a result of petitions, protests, and vigils staged by illegal alien advocacy groups.
[…]
Other findings included:
- ICE targeted 28 percent fewer aliens for deportation from the interior in 2013 than in 2012, despite sustained high numbers of encounters in the Criminal Alien and Secure Communities programs.
- Every ICE field office but one reported a decline in interior enforcement activity, with the largest decline in the Atlanta field office, which covers Georgia and the Carolinas.
- ICE reports that there are more than 870,000 aliens on its docket who have been ordered removed, but who remain in defiance of the law.
- Less than 2 percent of ICE’s caseload was in detention at the end of fiscal year 2013.
- About three-fourths of the aliens ICE detained in 2013 had criminal and/or immigration convictions so serious thatthe detention was required by statute.
What’s most surreal and heinous about this failure to enforce Federal law with respect to criminal illegals is that it is being actively promoted — that is, lawlessness, with respect to contemporary federal immigration law — by our very own President, as Sen Jeff Sessions discovered a few days back:
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a vocal opponent of granting citizenship to illegal immigrants, says law enforcement statistics show the Obama administration has already granted de facto amnesty to millions of illegal U.S. residents.
Sessions argues enforcement statistics show that record high deportations under the Obama administration almost solely consist of people convicted of serious criminal offenses, caught in the act of crossing the border illegally and fugitives for deportation.
These so-called “enforcement priorities” accounted for 98 percent of all removals by immigration and customs officials.Citing a review of published Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics for 2013, Sessions estimates that 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and people who overstayed their visas were allowed to stay in the country as long as they didn’t have criminal records.
“The evidence reveals that the administration has carried out a dramatic nullification of federal law. Under the guise of setting ‘priorities,’ the administration has determined that almost anyone in the world who can enter the United States is free to illegally live, work and claim benefits here as long as they are not caught committing a felony or other serious crime,” Sessions said in a statement.
[…]
Sessions says illegal immigrants who do not fall within the administration’s priority categories are allowed to work in the United States and receive taxpayer benefits. He noted a report by The Associated Press that 179 illegal workers taken into custody at a Phoenix car wash last year were quickly released because they did not have outstanding warrants or criminal convictions.
“American workers and taxpayers are entitled to the protections our immigration laws afford, yet the administration has suspended these protections, producing lower wages and higher unemployment,” Sessions said.
“Congressional Democrats have empowered this state of lawlessness,” he added.
Sessions argues a close examination of deportations in 2013 shows that an illegal immigrant without a serious criminal record is largely exempt from immigrant law enforcement in the interior of the country. About two-thirds of deportations were border apprehensions.
He says law enforcement statistics show that 82 percent of interior removals in 2013 were of convicted criminals. Of the 23,000 people deported without criminal convictions, 13,000 were fugitives or habitual violators of immigration law.
In all, law enforcement officials last year deported only 10,000 people who were not caught crossing the border, did not have serious criminal offenses or who were not fugitives or serial violators of immigration law, according to Sessions.
Given that the nation’s population of illegal immigrants is estimated at 12 million people, Sessions claims that less than 0.1 percent of illegal immigrants were deported in 2013.
“It falls on the shoulders of Republicans to reverse it — and to rescue the rule of law for the American people of today and tomorrow,” Sessions said.
And yet what are the Republicans doing? Pushing for comprehensive immigration reform — in direct defiance to the wishes of their base, and to the rule of law. The Democrats are after a logistical shift that will ensure that they win elections — a state the creates and continues big government statism that also benefits federal Republican lawmakers and, more importantly, those corporatist who fund and control them.
No one is left to represent us or the rule of law, save the few scattered voices of conservatives like Sessions, and the grass roots — whom the GOP establishment is meeting to try to “destroy” or “crush” so that they can reclaim, without upstart friction and serious primary challenges, their role as professional statist politicians growing fat in the corridors of DC.
Something has to give. From what I understand, 22 states have now, largely below the media radar, approved participation in a convention of the states. 12 more are needed.
Time is running short. Cloward-Piven is in full force — and the voice vote the GOP used to circumvent its own caucus last week in order to ram through the “doc fix” (that is, to subsidize pay to doctors at more taxpayer expense) is yet another move toward its end.
GOP establishment types see the writing on the wall, I’m convinced, and are working to feather their nests before what is now an inevitable collapse, should we not be able to reform DC by way of returning power to the states and reigning in bureaucracies and deficit spending of staggering amounts.
The people simply must rise up. And even then, it may be too late.
Ach, but what need is “rule of law” when a praeternatural All-Mind will suffice?
And what if deportation shall be the whole of the punishment for a crime?
“Because the investigation is ongoing . . . ”
This phrase has become a striking staple of the practice of modern journalism. Information (like a photograph) must be carefully guarded in order to prevent
justice from being doneuntoward and inordinate prejudice from gaining a foothold in public, and particularly with regard to prejudicial information respecting our public servants.